The Seagull
It's the play that's influenced all plays.
JOSHUA: I've always been a massive fan of
I just think it's the most beautifully crafted play.
I think
and wherever you're from and however old you are,
there's something in it that you'll grasp on to.
The Seagull
It's written at the end of the 19th century
and it's about Irina Arkadina.
She's a world-famous actress.
Arkadina's been away, acting, and she comes back one summer with her new lover,
Trigorin, who's a very famous writer.
But her son, Konstantin, also wants to be a writer,
but he wants to do revolutionary writing.
He wants to make new forms of theatre and he's written a play.
He gets his girlfriend, Nina, from the neighbouring estate, to act in his play.
The play begins when they are going to show the assembled company his new play.
But it goes terribly wrong because his mother, Arkadina, mocks the play
and says it's not very good because she likes more traditional work.
..that come from the marsh and wander until daybreak...
It's a brilliant play about ambition. It's a brilliant play about self-assessment.
It's a brilliant play about desperation.
It's a brilliant play about how boring life can be and what you do to combat it.
The Seagull
simply because the melodramatic moments
of both
are sort of getting ironed out by the time you get to
There's very little melodrama in it. So, in a way, you're watching...
Chekhov's fooling you, really, into thinking you're watching life
and you're really there with those people, observing their lives.
ROSAMUND: What Chekhov is exploring is, ultimately,
the meaning of life,
the nature of human existence and the idea of having a meaningful life.
All these characters are searching for meaning.
MICHAEL: There's not much going on in the plot.
It's really a study of people and human nature.
Really, at the core of it,
it's a searing and devastating examination of unrequited love.
It's sort of, "So-and-so loves so-and-so, who doesn't love them, who loves them."
Everyone's in love with the wrong person.
JOSHUA: It was the first play that required real nuance and subtlety
on the part of the actors.
It was the first play that dealt with really complicated, er...
..subtle emotional, you know, journeys.
Nina's the first one who mentions the seagull in the play.
..But it's as if I'm drawn across the lake, like a seagull.
She loves him in that moment
and that freedom and that soaring and all her passions are wrapped up with him.
So when Konstantin shoots the gull,
he's showing that a part of her has been destroyed by him
and that their relationship or that love, that feeling has ended.
It's very cruel to pick an image that she chose in a moment of love.
So then, when Trigorin sees the seagull
and uses it within his story and puts her in his story,
which immortalises her, because she feels like the seagull.
..catches sight of her and,
well, for no other reason but that he can,
he destroys her, just like this seagull.
Then, by the end, you learn everything
about how their relationship has ended and everything that's happened between them.
I'm the seagull. No! That's not right. I'm the actress...
"The seagull" — she repeats it at the end.
To me, it's a kind of...
I looked a lot at late-onset Tourette's
because she comes out with these outbursts.
For me, that was a way in to saying the line, because it's a very hard line to say.
She says it repeatedly and then corrects herself.
It's kind of like an outburst that's coming from somewhere,
from all the trauma.
It's a really horrible and beautiful metaphor throughout the play.
Art is very much at the heart of this play.
"New forms" is something which Konstantin says at the beginning about his own play,
the play within the play — "We need new forms."
..always the same thing.
The exaggerated lighting, the three walls, these priests of art.
Chekhov was writing a new form of drama
with
He wrote it when he was still so young, and yet...
he can understand the kind of complexities of a relationship.
He just seems to have a kind of natural access to it that I find extraordinary.